A Sharp Intake of Breath at “Fiddler on the Roof”

In a recent performance of “Fiddler on the Roof,” it seemed more than usually pertinent that, for a portion of the audience, the story was the story of their own families.

Photograph by Everett

“Where will we live in America?" one character asks of another. “With Uncle Abram, but he doesn't know it yet!” “Where are you going?” another asks. “To my brother-in-law, in Chicago. I hate him, but a relative is a relative!” “Tzeitel, don't forget the baby! We have to catch a train and a boat!” On Thursday evening, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the night before Donald Trump decided to bar immigrants from entering America, a familiar drama unfolded on the stage of a school on the East Side of Manhattan.

In the audience, on folding chairs: parents, students who’ve stayed late at school to see the fall drama’s opening night, little brothers and sisters who’ve been lugged along, grandparents, aunts and uncles, faculty. There’s a pit orchestra, a few ramps going up to the stage, and the set. A few lopsided houses, a ramp, a roof stable enough for a violinist: it’s a village somewhere. It’s the opening of “Fiddler on the Roof.” My daughter has helped build the sets. “Not ‘Fiddler’ again,” a friend said, when I asked her to go along.

I can report that this particular “Fiddler” was terrific, full of spunk and spark; a wonderful wagon for Tevye to pull; an astonishing and terrifying ghost of Grandma, at least ten feet tall; tender lovers; the poignant tug between the present and the past; a violinist who kept her balance on the tippy roof. But it seemed more than usually pertinent that, for a portion of the Thursday-night theatre-goers, the story was the story of their own families, Russian Jews forced to leave rural villages where they had lived for generations, in an instant. It is the story of my family.

I sat in the balcony and I watched the play, and, underneath the pleasure, and the applause, for the first time, I felt fear. At five, the child who would become my paternal grandfather was put on a ship with his three-year-old sister and told to look out for her on the ocean voyage. When my children were small and it occurred to me that I was hovering, I thought of those two little children, their names pinned to their woollen jackets. My maternal grandmother, who died a decade ago, at the age of a hundred and three, had two memories of what she called “The Old Country.” The first was of being bathed in milk by her mother, a memory that has always confounded me, and by the time I thought to ask it was too late, and the second was of being hidden in a closet and told to stay very still and not breathe. She was three. “I was little, and I took little breaths,” she told me. The next day, they left for America.

Cynthia Zarin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1983. She teaches at Yale. Her new book, “Orbit,” is a collection of poems.

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